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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23713729">A shared history</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcronagall/pseuds/mcronagall'>mcronagall</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 10:00:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,913</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23713729</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mcronagall/pseuds/mcronagall</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Dee can barely recall a time when she and Dennis got along, let alone more than that...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dee Reynolds/Dennis Reynolds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A shared history</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Present</b>
</p><p>Deandra Reynolds had just gotten home to discover her twin brother, Dennis, laid out on the couch looking angry.</p><p><i>Jesus Christ</i>, she thought. <i>When is he going to make up with Mac and get out of my life again?</i></p><p>She was nervous about him being there. Everything about him made her nervous. His violent temper. His demeaning attitude. The omnipresent fact that he was always the more beautiful twin, and their now deceased mother never let her forget it.</p><p>What’s even worse is now, that he would dare turn to her in his time of need, again. He was always coming to her when he had no one else, because he knew that unlike every other woman in his life, she would always be bound to him.</p><p>“Hey, Dennis,” she said to him, leaning against the kitchen wall after setting down the twelve-pack of beer she had just bought onto the kitchen table. She hoped tonight would be one of his better nights. She also knew full well that there never were any better nights anymore. It was always him and his yelling, or more passive insults. She was just thankful he channeled his more physical acts of aggression on Mac instead of her, though it seems even he had grown sick of her brother, seeing as he had spent the last few days crashing on her sofa.</p><p>“What? Oh, hey Dee,” Dennis said, broken from a train of thought. He hadn’t even noticed her enter the apartment, he was too busy remembering a situation from earlier in the day.</p><p>“You would not <i>believe</i> the shit that happened at the bar earlier,” he said while sitting up. He was getting riled up fast, as he usually does these days. Zero to a hundred, faster than his Range Rover. He wasn’t always so angry, so consumed by his unadulterated rage, but he was always emotional. She remembers when they were younger, much younger, that she had spent many nights hearing him sob across the hall, and deciding then as carefully as she does now how she would choose to react.</p><p>Sometimes, she’d play some pop music loudly from her room, to both cheer him up and offer him some dignity in the false comfort that maybe he was not being heard. Sometimes he would come into her room, with his eyes still red, asking if she heard their nanny crying, because of how embarrassing that would be.</p><p>
  <b>Past</b>
</p><p>“Hey Dee,” a much younger Dennis Reynolds said, standing at his sister’s doorway, leaning against the doorframe.</p><p>Dee looked up from her bed and turned down the music from her boombox.</p><p>“Oh, hi Dennis.” She was cautious and unsure of how to treat her brother, who had been sobbing dramatically just a few minutes ago.</p><p>Before she could decide whether tonight would be the night she asked him to open up to her, he entered her room and sat next to her on her pink bed, reaching below the mattress and grabbing a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, handing one to Dee and lighting another for himself.</p><p>“Wait, how did you know that?” Dee had only bought the cigarettes to scare her mother into worrying about her, but quickly got scared and hid her smoking to the confines of her bedroom, out the window when her parents were out of town.</p><p>Dennis laughed, taking a drag from the cigarette and blowing the smoke in her face. Dee coughed and rubbed her eyes, not unused to such cruelty from her twin brother, but disappointed nonetheless.</p><p>He must have noticed her discomfort, because he quickly felt guilty for his action.</p><p>“Ah, Dee. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.” He seemed to genuinely mean it, too, as his demeanor completely changed. He was suddenly deep in thought, and Dee then remember the sobs she had heard earlier.</p><p>“Hey, you know, it’s not a big deal. It was funny, even,” Dee said. Her instinct was to protect him from himself, feeling instantly guilty for making him feel bad, even though her eyes still stung from the smoke.</p><p>Dennis flicked his still-lit cigarette out her window, watching it fall down the multi-story house onto the Reynolds’ family’s meticulously kept lawn.</p><p>“You know what I’d like to do?” Dennis said, not looking up from the window. His face was glazed over and blank for uncomfortably long, then immediately sprang into a big grin.</p><p>“Let’s rip up the garden.”</p><p>
  <b>Present</b>
</p><p>Sometimes Dee can hardly believe the truth of their past together.</p><p>It wasn’t just when they were kids. They always seemed to find their way back to each other.</p><p>When Dee chose to work at Dennis’s bar, she wondered if they would get back to the space they’d occupied together. You know, as twins. That used to be something they cared about, that mutual experience of twinhood. Nowadays, it felt like Dennis forgot she was his sister, let alone someone he used to care about.</p><p>His mockery and insults were nothing new, as he had quickly learned as a teenager that his capacity for cruelness against his own twin sister was a ticket to attention and mild popularity. But it used to be balanced by those moments in the middle of the night, where they could at least laugh and sing and be together.</p><p>Dee grabbed two beers from the table, twisting both of the caps off with her hand one after the other. She handed one to Dennis and began drinking hers. </p><p>She decided she was going to play nice tonight, for some reason. The voice at the back of her head, the bad one, was telling her to stand up to her brother, and tell him that he needed to either get his act together or at least learn to treat her better. But she was still too scared to confront him in that way, especially without the other guys there as a buffer.</p><p>She was used to this, course—the feeling of not wanting the night to become a whole thing.</p><p>So as her brother revved up, she stayed calm, taking a seat in a nearby chair and looking at him very seriously.</p><p><i>You used to actually take this seriously</i>, Dee thought to herself when she realized what she was doing. Maybe that’s how she was able to act so convincingly here when she usually failed at that kind of thing. It was all once so real.</p><p>Not that she’d admit it to herself, but it was still kind of real. Dennis terrified her, but somewhere deep inside her was the teenage girl who loved him more than anyone else. </p><p>This becomes all the worse when she remembered that he used to feel the same way about her.</p><p>
  <b>Past</b>
</p><p>Dee and Dennis Reynolds took turns drinking out of a bottle of Jameson they stole from their parents’ bedroom. This was one of the last few good nights they had, until they had ended up at college together a few years later.</p><p>They were half-laying on their front lawn, propped up by their elbows, and very intoxicated at this point, laughing about the mess they had made of their mother’s favorite petunias. Dee had wanted to feel bad about it, but she knew that she loved the feeling of ripping the flowers from their soil just as much as her brother did, and now she was too drunk to pretend she felt differently.</p><p>“Now that, Deandra, is what I call a better home and garden,” Dennis said, too drunk but mostly too young to make much sense or profundity.</p><p>Dee laughed and rolled over so that she was resting her head on Dennis’ shoulder.</p><p>“Dennis, that doesn’t even make sense,” she said.</p><p>Dennis wrapped his arm around his sister, laughing instead of feeling insulted that she didn’t think something he said was brilliant. Something about this alcohol was making him feel a lot less terrible than he had earlier, and it was emboldening.</p><p>“No, no. Listen. It makes a ton of sense,” he told her, looking up at the stars instead of at her. “All these women that mom is friends with, they all care about this superficial shit, how nice their homes and gardens look—that’s why they sell them a magazine on how to make them better.</p><p>“But none of them actually do anything about it. They hire gardeners, and interior designers, and then they fight with each other over who has the true eye for these things, as if they can take any responsibility for what their homes look like. And, it’s not even like they spend time at home to appreciate it before the next season comes and everything has to change.” </p><p>Dennis looked annoyed at that bit, probably remembering that he hadn’t been able to spend quality time with his mother in several months, as she was always on vacation somewhere.</p><p>“But, what was I saying? Oh. Yeah. So this, this <i>is</i> the better home and garden because it’s the more accurate depiction of what all those women are anyway.”</p><p>“What’s that?” Dee asked.</p><p>“Torn up old hags that used to be something beautiful, but have always been useless.” Dennis looked serious for a moment.</p><p>Then, after a moment, Dennis let out a huge laugh, a bigger laugh than any that Dee had heard from him before. The sound of it scared her, but it was also exciting in a way she deeply desired. She needed to see how far it would go, because she was too naive to know that when it got there, she would desire exactly the opposite.</p><p>And maybe it was because of the whiskey or because they both had a penchant for pushing things as far as they would go, Dennis leaned in and kissed his sister—softly for only a second, and then aggressively.</p><p>
  <b>Present</b>
</p><p><i>You really had no idea how far it could go</i>, Dee thought to herself whenever these memories arose.</p><p>Not that she thought about it often. It’s not like they ever spoke about it. Except that time she tried to, after her breakdown in college, and it happened again. And when it happened again at the Halloween party, where they both knew full well who was on the other side of each costume. Though they could never tell the rest of the gang this truth, she was secretly thankful for an excuse to go back to where she pretended that she never wanted to go again.</p><p>And she wasn’t about to bring it up tonight, even though she felt it hanging over them now that he’d been staying on her couch for a few nights now. But she had long been used to the feeling suspended inside her, and it actually surprised her that she was noticing it for the first time in a while.</p><p>Years went by without so much as a consideration, years that she spent working and scheming alongside her brother, but something about right now was familiar to her. Sometimes when she was seeing things blurry she noticed the Dennis she had grown up with, peering through the narcissist she knew almost exclusively now.</p><p>Even now, his anger feels more performative than it does genuine. But she knows not to count on this.</p><p><i>The man I used to know is no longer around</i>, she often reminds herself. But that’s not really the truth. </p><p>
  <i>The man who is here now is the culmination of everything we’ve been through.</i>
</p>
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